How to Make a Resume With No Experience (College Students and New Grads)

Which sections should an entry-level resume have?

Use this order while you are still in college or just graduated:

• Header: name, phone, email, LinkedIn, GitHub or portfolio link.
• Education: degree, school, graduation date (or expected), GPA if it helps you, and 4 to 6 relevant courses.
• Experience: internships, part-time jobs, research assistant or teaching assistant roles, freelance work. Skip it if you have none yet.
• Projects: 2 to 4 projects with what you built, the tech you used and the result.
• Technical skills: grouped as Languages, Frameworks and Tools.
• Achievements and activities: hackathons, coding contest ranks, scholarships, club roles, volunteering.

How do I write project bullet points?

Use the pattern: action verb + what you built + how + the result. If you have no result numbers yet, describe scale or scope honestly.

• Built a book marketplace for students with Next.js and PostgreSQL; 1,200 users across 3 campuses.
• Cut page load time from 3.1s to 1.2s by caching API responses in Redis.
• Trained an image classifier in PyTorch that reached 91% accuracy on a 10-class dataset.

Should a student resume have a summary?

It is optional. If you add one, keep it to two lines: what you study, what you are good at, and the role you want. A strong Projects section usually does more for you than a summary.

How long should it be?

One page. Recruiters for internships and entry-level roles expect it, and it forces you to keep only your strongest points.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Listing skills you could not discuss in an interview.
• Using a heavily designed template with icons, photos and skill bars that ATS software cannot read.
• Writing duties ("responsible for") instead of results ("built", "reduced", "won").
• Sending the same resume to every job instead of adding the keywords each job asks for.